Detroit Valentine

Elmore Leonard got in late and lit up his first cigarette since Michigan, just inside the door of the apartment on Horatio Street. The pack read Virginia Slims. “I was writing a book,” he said. “And the girl—the character—started smoking Virginia Slims, and every once in a while she’d say, ‘I think I’ll have a Slim.’ I started buying them because she liked them a lot.”

Julia Reyes Taubman gave him a hug. It was her apartment. West Village duplex, spiral staircase, views of the High Line and the pit where the new Whitney Museum is going to be. While waiting for him to arrive, she’d scribbled some ideas for remarks she wanted to make later that night at a party in her honor at the original Whitney, the one uptown. A book party. Her book. “Detroit: 138 Square Miles.” She’d spent seven years taking pictures of abandoned buildings and other derelict tableaux. Detroit has a lot of them, more than any other city, fair to say. She took thirty-five thousand photographs and chose four hundred. They make you want to go there but maybe not stay.

Leonard and Taubman are neighbors in Bloomfield Hills, a fancy suburb of Detroit. Leonard, who is eighty-six, has lived in Detroit since 1934. He made it to Bloomfield Hills by writing best-selling novels that often got turned into movies. She made it there, in 2001, by marrying Robert Taubman, the son of the mall magnate Alfred Taubman, and now the chairman of the Taubman real-estate investment trust. She calls her husband Bobcat.

Julia Taubman, who is forty-four, spent years chasing Elmore Leonard, to persuade him to write a foreword to her book. Finally, one day, she went to his house.

“We’ve been good friends ever since,” she said.

“Well, you came with a half gallon of rosé, with my daughter-in-law Julie and another gal,” Leonard said. “And we had a nice time.”

“The thing was he understood the point,” Taubman said. “He wasn’t nostalgic about it all.”

“I wanted to be part of it. This is a big, big book, and it’s going to be successful.”

“But you didn’t know it was going to weigh seven pounds.”

“Six-point-six. You know how many books of mine it would take to make that weight? Five.”

Leonard and Taubman sat side by side on a love seat that had Leonard adjusting his posture without satisfaction. He had on navy corduroys, a navy turtleneck, and a tweed sports coat. She wore a checked dress shirt and slim-cut olive-green pants with holes and patches and dangling straps, and a lot of crafty jewelry. In her left earlobe she had two baby teeth—one from each of her twin sons. “It’s my one original idea,” she said.

“I was elected to write the introduction, which is about six hundred words,” Leonard said. “It took me three months to get started. Because I don’t write that way.” (The usual way he writes is a couple of pages a day, which he might add a little to the next day. “I’ll add some cigarettes or something while they’re talking, just to break it up.”)

Some of the things Leonard wrote in his foreword were “Maybe that old machinery isn’t as ugly as I thought” and “Julia believes it should be preserved and appreciated any way it is, not restored.”

They both had some wine, and then Leonard switched to Miller Lite. Taubman showed him a sheet of paper on which she’d been practicing an inscription for the books she’d sign that night: “Rust in Peace—JRT.”

“I was trying to figure out how to sign these books,” she said. “Elmore kept telling me I should write ‘Take it easy,’ because that’s how he signs all his books, but that didn’t really work with this book. And then a friend of mine asked me about Megadeth, and I vaguely remembered an album cover of theirs. ‘Rust in Peace.’ It was Megadeth’s fourth studio album.”

Leonard had a Slim. Taubman had a few drags of it and passed it back.

One of Leonard’s ten rules of writing is never to use the word “suddenly.” But it was suddenly that Taubman said, “Meanwhile, I’m a wreck.”

There were sheets of paper on the table in front of them. She’d written a speech.

“Look, you’ve got it down,” he said.

“I do not have it down.”

“Good. Then you’ll ad-lib it.”

“I have to drink a lot of wine.”

“Good, drink wine.”

“But then I might say things. I dropped the F-bomb once. Which was great, I think, but I shouldn’t do it tonight.” She had a Slim. “There are four hundred people coming.”

He asked her, “Do you have any architecture jokes?”

“Other than Albert Kahn is the greatest American architect? Which he is, but nobody else agrees. Modest son of a rabbi . . .”

“How do you pick out an architect that you like?”

“Easily. Easily. Easily. You can tell the good ones from the bad ones right away.” She began to rhapsodize about buildings. The Packard Motor Car plant, Ford’s Highland Park plant, the Michigan Central Station. “When I first saw the Packard plant, I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t talking about it every minute of every day,” Taubman said.

Leonard said, “What if you started with a question? ‘Does anyone want to know why I shot these thirty-five thousand photos?’ ”

“Uh, no. Are you kidding?”

“How about a positive? ‘I’m going to tell you why I shot these thirty-five thousand pictures.’ ”

She held up the speech she’d written. “This is seven minutes. It’s going to bore them.”

“Open it up to questions—immediately.”

“Are you crazy?”

“We’ll see who’s interested!” Leonard said. “If you want to get people’s interest, you’ve got to talk about people, not architecture.”

“You’re better at talking about people. I like to talk about buildings.”

“Forget Albert Kahn for a second. Think about why you took all these pictures. It’s the city that attracted you, your having come from the East.”

Taubman’s pants had holes in both knees. Leonard pinched one of the holes and said, “Did you cut those, or did you buy them cut?”

“You ask the same thing every time.”

“All right, don’t think about anything. Just get up there and start talking.” ♦